I am currently reading Tina Fey’s Bossypants, and she has one segment where she’s talking about going to a seminar, and the woman leading it asks everyone in the audience at what moment they first knew they were a woman, as opposed to a girl.
Naturally, I stopped reading to think about that in terms of myself1 and I’m pretty sure it was when I paid my first gas bill at the beginning of my third year of college. I had had this big freak-out about utility bills when I was in my senior year of high school. One of my parents mentioned paying a water bill or something and I hadn’t really known you had to pay for water – ever – and I suddenly realized I wasn’t remotely prepared for the rigors of adulthood. At the time, I’d been quietly worrying that I’d be too homesick to ever live away from my parents even though I really, really wanted to live all kinds of places in the world. Now, with the introduction of the water bill concept, I realized there must be any number of administrative concerns I had failed to even consider.
I asked my mother to please list for me every sort of bill I was likely to come across, and I would write them all down and do some research.
“Usually gas and electric,” she said. “And heat, but sometimes that’s included. And that’s about it, really. Cable, if you want it.”
“What about air conditioning?” I asked.
“That comes in under electric.”
“And what about this water bill you were talking about? I really want you to try not to leave anything out.”
“Water bills are usually more when you own a house,” she said. “When you rent, your landlord usually pays for that. Same thing trash pickup, and some other things, too.”
“Okay. Now, do I need to have life insurance?”
After making my list and indulging in a day’s worth of anxiety over how much all these things would cost, and what the procedure was for signing up for them, and how you would even know you were supposed to if it hadn’t randomly occurred to you to ask your mother to make you a detailed list, I forgot about my utility-bill-related panic, went off to college, spent two years in the dorms, and then got an off-campus apartment with a friend.
About a month after we moved in, I found myself walking to the mailbox with a check for the gas company in my hand and I remembered my childish concerns back in high school, and all of a sudden, I felt immensely mature and capable and self-reliant and smart.
“So I’m a grown-up now,” I thought to myself. “It just all works itself out somehow. You don’t really have to try.”
This was, of course, an erroneous conclusion, but it took me another five years or so to realize that.
(image via)
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1As will become clear from the way in which I answered it, I completely misinterpreted the question. I thought it meant, when did you first realize you were an adult, but it turns out that it meant, when did you first realize men want to bang you.2 But then, I’ve been misinterpreting what ‘woman’ means since the concept was first introduced to me in sixth grade.
2I guess my answer to that is that I’m still always really surprised when they do.
